But did they?

The post New study: People got high without any munchies on THC-V appeared first on Leafly.

Leafly

Seattle Chief of Police Adrian Diaz is toast, at least as the city’s top hog, according to a source.

by Ashley Nerbovig

Seattle Chief of Police Adrian Diaz is toast, at least as the city’s top hog, according to a source. After a series of lawsuits accusing him of allowing a culture of sexism and racism at the Seattle Police Department, combined with rumors about an inappropriate relationship with a top aide, his stint as chief has come to a close after less than four years. 

On Tuesday, the day of Diaz’s departure, the City’s Office of Inspector General sent out an email explaining that it planned to investigate a complaint against Diaz over his hiring of a top aide, who he allegedly had an intimate relationship with.

The City has scheduled a press conference at 1 pm today, according to reports. 

Diaz became interim chief of the department in 2020 after the departure of Carmen Best. Mayor Bruce Harrell officially appointed Diaz to the position in September 2022. Before he began overseeing the department, he led SPD’s Collaborative Policing Bureau, which focused on community policing efforts such as youth violence intervention and educating the public about policing. 

This is a developing story.

The Stranger

The Stranger’s morning news roundup.

by Vivian McCall

Diaz is out: Ashley reports that Seattle Police Department Chief Adrian Diaz will no longer lead the department, according to a source. Sources told Fox 13 station that he cleaned out his desk last night, and that Mayor Bruce Harrell re-assigned him to special projects. The City will reportedly hold a press conference around 1 pm today. Ashley will have more on this developing story later.

Library cyber attack: Someone hit the Seattle Public Library system with a ransomware attack over the holiday weekend. It shut down several online services Tuesday. The attack affected staff and public computers, library loaning, access to the online catalog, e-books, e-audiobooks and the main website, which is now back online. Buildings remained open, allowing people to check out regular-ass books with old-school paper forms, which, if anything, should bolster your stalwart faith in our greatest public amenity.

Shame on you: City Council Member Maritza Rivera introduced a last-minute amendment to pull funding for a City initiative that empowers BIPOC-led community groups to build capital projects, and BIPOC-led organizations shamed her for about three embarrassing hours. They called Rivera, her amendment to pull funding, and her supportive colleagues racist, and a lot of other adjectives Hannah reported here. The council voted 6-3 to delay a vote on the amendment until next week.

Council delays Rivera’s attempt to gut equitable development initiative so she can combat “disinformation.” It is unclear how she will convert the three hours worth of public commenters who accused her of balancing the budget on backs’ of Black people. https://t.co/E8nl81LanC

— Hannah Krieg (@hannahkrieg) May 29, 2024

Why are there so many migrants in Tukwila? Spoiler, it’s not because Tukwila is (or isn’t!) awesome. According to the Seattle Times, it all started with a 911 call about six Venezuelan migrants on Jackson Street in the summer of 2022, who were the first of more than a dozen referrals to Riverton Park United Methodist Church, an institution that actually has provided a response to clear community needs. Seattle, meanwhile, has taken no ownership of a crisis it helped start.

Brouwer’s Café is closing after 19 years: The Fremont bar’s general manager told the Seattle Times that the rising costs of food, beer, labor, and shortages of servers and low foot traffic led to its demise. It opened in 2005 as a marvel, with West Coast beer dorks coming from as far as California to ogle its 64-tap, 400-bottle selection. The lights go out for good on June 29.

Air Force awarded Boeing $7.5 billion guided bomb contract: Under the contract, Boeing will build kits that convert “dumb” bombs into “smart” guided bombs known as Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The company will also provide spares, repairs, and technical assistance to the US government until February 2030. The US sends JDAM-equipped bombs to Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel.

BUI: As Ashley wrote yesterday, a woman fell off a boat into Lake Washington Monday night. Seattle Police have since impounded the boat and arrested the 46-year-old man who owns it, who they suspect of boating under the influence. The woman is feared dead. The US Coast Guard stopped searching yesterday, but the Seattle Police Department’s Harbor Patrol Unit is still looking. 

Israel intensifies attacks on Rafah in Gaza: Israeli tanks are advancing further into Rafah in a ground invasion that is drawing widespread international condemnation. Israel shelled a tent camp in the “safe zone” west of the city, killing at least 21 Palestinian civilians. Over the weekend, another Israeli bombing on the outskirts of Rafah killed 45 and injured 200 in an ensuing fire, most of them women and children. Al Jazeera reports Israeli air raids and artillery have killed 15 people today. The UN says only 170 trucks have made it to Palestinians in the last three weeks, when 500 are needed daily. There’s no indication that the Rafah crossing will open to allow more aid any time soon. President Joe Biden says Israel has still not crossed a “red line,” which he defines as a mass troop invasion. 

Jury deliberations begin in Trump trial: In the seventh week of Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial, prosecutors spoke to the jury a final time, urging them to convict the former president for allegedly falsifying 34 business records to cover up his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels. The defense called Cohen a liar and said the payment was just business, not a crime. As the jury deliberates, the wait for a verdict now begins.

RFK Jr. doesn’t stop lyinggg: First he claims a worm ate part of his brain, and now he’s out with a pretty fake story about indigenous Peruvians ambushing him with bows drawn while on a whitewater rafting trip in the 1970s. Kennedy told the story in a 1984 book, claiming that he and his cousin Christian Kennedy Lawford fought back with a stick of dynamite. His cousin told a more realistic version in his 2005 memoir: drunk villagers once shot an arrow from the shore in their general direction. Kennedy’s campaign did not respond to Huff Post’s request for comment.

Not a slay, Francis: Earlier this month, Pope Francis and a few bishops were yakking it up about whether or not to admit gay men into Catholic seminaries in preparation for the priesthood. Francis wasn’t into it and said that there was already enough “frociaggine” going on there, the Italian equivalent to faggotness or faggotry. He apologized.

I can’t get a bead on his Holiness and gay stuff, and neither can queer Catholics. This year, he said that “sex change” surgery and “gender theory” were grave threats to human dignity, but he’s also said that trans people can be baptized and serve as Godparents. Last year, he told priests they should bless people in gay relationships but not the relationship.

Pope Francis is queerbaiting again

— Lolo (@LolOverruled) May 29, 2024

World’s longest-serving flight attendant dies: Bette Nash died at 88 after serving as a flight attendant for 67 years. Nash started her job at the now-defunct Eastern Airlines in 1957, when airlines treated women terribly. Some companies still put age caps on the “stewardesses” they advertised as would-be brides for horny executives. She must have had an iron will; I can only hope she did it for love of the game and not an inability to retire.

Say cheese or die: People are filming—or pretending to film—Chipotle workers because they think the restaurant is directing employees to skimp out on portions. Chipotle denies this. Delish asks, “genius” or “greedy;” I ask, “What the fuck is wrong with you psychopaths?” Making workers’ lives even worse for one extra spoonful of wet slop meat is certifiable. You’re not sticking up to a corporation. You’re ruining a teenager’s afternoon.

The Stranger

In the face of an inflation-driven $250 million budget shortfall, Rivera’s amendment continues to cement the council’s commitment to the wealthy, to corporations, and to fiscal conservatism at the expense of marginalized communities suffering under the pressures of the ongoing housing crisis.

by Hannah Krieg

For more than three hours, BIPOC-led organizations shamed Council Member Maritza Rivera for her last-minute amendment to rug-pull funding for the beloved Equitable Development Initiative (EDI). EDI, passed in 2016, aims to curb displacement by empowering BIPOC-led community groups to build affordable housing, community centers, and other capital projects. They called Rivera, her supportive colleagues, and the amendment racist, discriminatory, ridiculous, preposterous, outrageous, appalling, tone-deaf, short-sighted, misguided, and ugly. 

Instead of “listening to community” and bending to their will, as she vowed to do on the campaign trail, Rivera motioned to delay the bill for a week to give her time to combat alleged “disinformation” and “fear-mongering” about her amendment. 

The council voted 6-3 to delay it until next week. Council Member Dan Strauss, as Budget Chair, voted no because he did not want to delay a small technical bill when Rivera could mess with EDI during the supplemental budget process this summer. Tammy Morales and Joy Hollingsworth voted no because they won’t support it, whether they have extra time to mull it over or not. Morales, who called on the public to oppose the amendment, expressed her disappointment that Rivera would drag out the debate.

“Frankly, if you want to propose legislation that rolls back commitments made to Black and brown communities, at least have the courage to stand by your legislation and vote on it or acknowledge that you made a mistake and withdraw it,” Morales said. 

The Hill Rivera Died On

On Friday afternoon before a long weekend, Rivera proposed an amendment on the carry forward ordinance, a small technical bill that basically confirms previous budgetary promises. The amendment would pause $25.3 million that the previous council already promised in the 2024 budget, jeopardizing more than 50 capital projects–mostly Black-led, mostly in the South End—such as 130 units of affordable housing in Africatown’s Midtown plaza, a community center for Cham refugees, and Estelita’s social justice library on Beacon Hill. 

The proviso would block the Office of Community Planning and Development (OPCD) from releasing those funds until it spent the $53.5 million the program already has, provided detailed analysis on the projects EDI funds, and, after all that, secured a majority council vote of approval. The OPCD would have until September before Rivera’s amendment would siphon the $25.3 million to fill the general fund deficit. Given how long these kinds of projects take, it seems unrealistic that OPCD could disperse those funds in four months. 

Rivera claims that the amendment would actually not hurt the 50+ current projects. Rather, she is just concerned “that there is no transparency as to how the department plans to move the majority of the EDI projects awarded to date to completion.” It is unclear how threatening to reabsorb their money would help bring those projects to completion. 

EDI projects take a long time, according to the organizations who testified, because BIPOC-led groups are not typically experienced developers. For example, Chief Seattle Club started receiving funding from EDI before it ever built housing. 

Plus, as Morales noted during the meeting, the council does not apply this level of scrutiny to the Office of Housing or to Seattle Department of Transportation. “It is interesting to me that the programs that are meant to assist with reversing harm done to communities of color are more closely scrutinized than other programs in the city and are consistently at risk of being defunded more than other programs in the City,” Morales said.

Rivera may claim she’s not trying to kill EDI, but it’s not the first time the council killed an anti-displacement and affordable housing initiative. Earlier this month, the council rejected Council Member Tammy Morales’s Connected Communities Pilot program, which would have given development incentives for low-income, community-centered housing at no cost to the City. The Mayor also fucked over marginalized residents by eliminating all new anti-displacement strategies from his broadly disappointing Comprehensive Plan. 

She’s So Ronald Regan-Coded

Beyond that, in the face of an inflation-driven $250 million budget shortfall, Rivera’s amendment continues to cement the council’s commitment to the wealthy, to corporations, and to fiscal conservatism at the expense of marginalized communities suffering under the pressures of the ongoing housing crisis. 

Not only does Rivera’s proviso jeopardize BIPOC projects, it also initiates the council’s raid of the JumpStart payroll tax, a tax on the City’s very largest corporations specifically dedicated to funding affordable housing, Green New Deal initiatives, and economic development. About $19.8 million of EDI’s $25.3 million comes from the JumpStart payroll tax. About 9% of JumpStart must fund EDI by law. 

Most of the city council ran on an anti-tax platform, despite knowing full well the City faces a quarter-billion budget shortfall in 2025. The anti-tax advocates that got the newbies elected, including the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, have suggested the City move JumpStart funds into the general fund, defunding affordable housing and climate initiatives instead of taxing big business. 

Several commenters anticipated Rivera and the council using the deficit as justification. 

“I understand that there’s a budget shortfall,” said Jill Freidburg, co-founder of Wa Na Wari. “It’s the city council’s job to be creative in solving problems like budget shortfalls, not to reinforce structural inequities because it’s the easiest way to close a budget shortfall. The City has been solving budget shortfalls on the backs of Seattle’s Black communities for decades. Go find the money somewhere else this time.”

Public commenters suggested the council found money to fill the deficit in the Seattle Police Department. After all, the council just approved 24% retroactive raises in the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract. 

Council candidate Alexis Mercedes Rinck said in order to address the deficit equitably, the City must implement new progressive revenue. Luckily for the council, their predecessors left them a menu of options to help fill the budget hole. However, Budget Chair Dan Strauss told The Stranger that the council will not consider new revenue until the Mayor hands down his budget draft this fall. 

Public commenters will likely return to City Hall to defend EDI next week. It is unclear what Rivera will say to convince those she scorned that she’s not trying to “slap” communities in the face or balance the City budget on the backs of Black people.  

The Stranger

Does Robert De Niro Consume Weed

He can make you an offer you don’ refuse. Don’ worry. But does Robert De Niro consume weed.

The post Does Robert De Niro Consume Weed appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

On the Magnum: Dr. Evan Goldstein

by The Stranger

Yikes! Her boyfriend’s pre-teen son has been stealing her underwear. This very naughty lad lives with them half the time. How can she get this boundary violation out of her head?

Twelve long years ago, he cheated on his wife. They got through it with therapy and endless processing. While watching TV with their kids (age 10 and 13) the subject of infidelity came up on the show, and his wife appeared upset. She was angry that he didn’t pause the show and tell his kids that he had cheated on their mom. How can he work with her unresolved issues?

On the Magnum, we are delighted to bring back our favorite anal surgeon, Dr. Evan Goldstein of Bespoke Surgical. Dr. Goldstein has a new book out: Butt Seriously: The Definitive Guide to Anal Health, Pleasure, and Everything In Between. His take on sexual health and prioritizing pleasure is refreshing and rare. He and Dan talk about the health challenges transwomen face, and whether you can stretch out your ass in one fateful evening.

A gay man has a bad track record with polyamory. Every time he gets together with a couple, trouble follows. Does it work for anyone? Ever?

width=”100%”>

The Stranger

Including Tangerine Sunrise, Lemon Tree, and Wagyu.

The post Leafly Buzz: 12 hot cannabis strains of May 2024 appeared first on Leafly.

Leafly

New York Gets Cannabis Leadership Change

After a chaotic rollout, lost state revenue and more, New York gets cannabis leadership change – FINALLY.

The post New York Gets Cannabis Leadership Change appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Jinkx Monsoon & Major Scales, Pearl Jam, and More Top Picks

by EverOut Staff

This week, we’re closing May out strong and diving right into June, thanks in part to stellar events from Jinkx Monsoon & Major Scales: Together Again, Again! to Pearl Jam and from MoPOP’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival to Bacon Eggs & Kegs.

TUESDAY
LIVE MUSIC

Holly Humberstone
Having opened for pop royalty like Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red, British singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone has collected some major Gen Z street cred since releasing her 2020 EP, Falling Asleep at the Wheel. Now embarking on a headlining tour, Humberstone will play songs from her debut album Paint My Bedroom Black, which documents her knack for capturing turbulent life moments like breaking up (“Antichrist”) and homesickness (“Room Service”). AUDREY VANN
(Neumos, Capitol Hill)

The Stranger

LNG is one of the most pressing risks to our climate and communities in the US, but because of the fossil fuel industry’s false advertising, most people have never heard of it.

by Emma Coopersmith

Outside the office building, we paused to hand out signs. A bright orange-and-yellow sun with the phrase “Defend Environmental Justice” written on it, “People Over Fossil Fuels” written on used cardboard, and the shortest on—”Stop LNG” written in Sharpie. Together, they expressed the reasons we were taking action: the buildout of liquified natural gas, or LNG, currently spreading across the Gulf South and throughout the country. 

LNG is one of the most pressing risks to our climate and communities in the US, but because of the fossil fuel industry’s false advertising, most people have never heard of it. Chances are you’ve seen it, though. If you live in the Seattle area, you may have spotted a slogan on the side of energy trucks that reads, “Going Green with LNG!” However, while the industry promotes LNG as a clean energy source, it is actually a nonrenewable fossil fuel posing serious risks to the safety of our communities.

The infrastructure it takes to process LNG pollutes nearby land and water, leading to higher rates of cancer and other illnesses. Because of its high methane content, LNG also fuels the existing climate crisis. Now, when every degree the planet warms multiplies the destruction and suffering that climate disasters are already causing, expanding this dangerous fuel is not a choice we can afford to make.

As Seattle feels these impacts in the form of floods, deadly heat waves, and suffocating blankets of wildfire smoke, it is past time to hold the fossil fuel industry and corporations accountable for the climate deception and destruction they’ve caused. So, we’re pushing back. We refuse to be scammed and exploited, and our movement is already making an impact at all levels of government. Under pressure from a coalition of organizers across the country, led by young people and frontline communities, President Biden recently announced a national pause on LNG exports. But Washington state has a dirty little secret: Puget Sound Energy—a privately owned corporation and Washington’s primary energy provider—continues to expand Washington’s reliance on LNG.

Despite PSE’s claims, LNG is not safe or reliable. In addition to its other risks, the failure of gas infrastructure during the cold snap that hit the Seattle area this January showed that we can’t depend on gas to meet the needs of our communities—especially during extreme weather. Using gas for heating and cooking can be dangerous as well. Besides the risks of leaks and explosions, the emissions from stoves are linked to asthma and other health conditions, especially for children. 

We are not stopping with the national pause, though: as young people, we are fighting for an end to LNG here and now. House Bill 1589, which bans new gas connections from Puget Sound Energy, recently passed the State Legislature. The dangerous Tacoma LNG expansion project was abandoned after community residents and the Puyallup tribe challenged it in court. In February, we met after school at Puget Sound Energy’s headquarters in Bellevue to deliver a petition calling on PSE to stop supporting the expansion of LNG infrastructure, end misleading advertising of LNG, and accelerate a just transition off all fossil fuels. 

This momentum won’t sustain itself. We need you to take action. Encourage your elected officials to oppose LNG expansion, and if you can, take steps to transition off “natural” gas. Together, we can protect our climate, health, communities, and future.

Emma Coopersmith is a dedicated climate justice advocate, peer educator, and Swiftie.  She organizes with the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour. She’s a high school senior in Seattle. 

Hannah Lindell-Smith is a community and political organizer, movement artist, and student at Summit Atlas High School. She’s currently the Coalitions Lead at Zero Hour. 

The Stranger